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Bouncing Back

“When we left Newport, it was a thriving cotton town, and I hated to leave. We had built a life there, and it was so disturbing to have to walk away from it. I have said that time and time again. I still have good friends there from those days.”

—HELEN WALTON

I came out of that Newport experience with my pride a little damaged, but I had made money on the sale of the Ben Franklin—more than $50,000. The whole thing was probably a blessing. I had a chance for a brand-new start, and this time I knew what I was doing. Now, at the age of thirty-two, I was a full-fledged merchant; all I needed was a store. Helen and the kids and I started driving around in the spring of 1950 hunting in earnest for one, and northwest Arkansas appealed to us for several reasons. First, for Helen it was a whole lot closer to her folks in Claremore than Newport had been. And it was good for me because I wanted to get closer to good quail hunting, and with Oklahoma, Kansas, Arkansas, and Missouri all coming together right there it gave me easy access to four quail seasons in four states.

We tried to buy a store in Siloam Springs, on the Oklahoma border, but we couldn’t come to terms with the owner, Jim Dodson, who later became a friend of ours. So one day Helen’s father and I drove into Bentonville and had a look around the square. It was the smallest of the towns we considered, and it already had three variety stores, when one would have been enough. Still, I love competition, and it just struck me as the right place to prove I could do it all over again. We found an old store willing to sell—Harrison’s Variety Store—but we needed to double its size, and to do that we had to get a ninety-nine-year lease on the barbershop next door (no more five-year leases for me). These two old widows from Kansas City who owned it wouldn’t budge, and, frankly, if Helen’s father hadn’t gone up there—unbeknownst to me—and negotiated a deal, I’m not sure where the Waltons would have ended up.

HELEN WALTON:

“Bentonville really was just a sad-looking country town, even though it had a railroad track to it. It was mostly known for apples, but at the time chickens were beginning to come on. I remember I couldn’t believe this was where we were going to live. It only had 3,000 people, compared to Newport, which was a thriving cotton and railroad town of 7,000 people. The store was a small old country town store with cans of lace, boxes of hats, sewing patterns, everything you can imagine just stored around everywhere. But I knew right after we got here that it was going to work out.”

Now I had a store to run again, and even though it didn’t do but $32,000 the year before I bought it-compared to $250,000 at Newport—it didn’t matter that much because I had big plans. We tore the wall out between the barbershop and the old store, put in brand-new fluorescent fixtures instead of the few low-watt bulbs they had hanging from the ceiling, and basically built a new store in there. It was a huge store for Bentonville at the time—50 feet by 80 feet, or 4,000 square feet. Charlie Baum of Ben Franklin came to my rescue again. This time he helped me break down all those fixtures he had helped me put up in my old Eagle Store. We loaded them onto a big truck, which I drove over to Bentonville from Newport. We had to get on an old dirt road to bypass a weigh station over at Rogers because I knew our load was illegal several different ways. Bouncing on that old road tore up half the fixtures. Anyway, Charlie and I installed them again. Around this time, I read an article about these two Ben Franklin stores up in Minnesota that had gone to self-service—a brand-new concept at the time. I rode the bus all night long to two little towns up there—Pipestone and Worthington. They had shelves on the side and two island counters all the way back. No clerks with cash registers around the store. Just checkout registers up front. I liked it. So I did that too.

CHARLIE BAUM:

“As soon as Sam moved the store from Newport to Bentonville, he had a nice big sale, and we put barrels full of stuff all around the floor. Those elderly ladies would come in and bend way down over into those barrels. I’ll never forget this. Sam takes a look, frowns, and says: ‘One thing we gotta do, Charlie. We gotta be real strong in lingerie.’ Times had been hard, and some of those underthings were pretty ragged.”

So when Charlie and I laid out that store in Bentonville it became only the third self-service variety store in the whole country and the first in our eight-state area. Maybe nobody here knew it, but it was a big deal. We’ve got our first ad from the July 29, 1950, Benton County Democrat on display today down at our Wal-Mart Visitors Center. It’s for the Grand Remodeling Sale of Walton’s Five and Dime, promising a whole bunch of good stuff: free balloons for the kids, a dozen clothespins for nine cents, iced tea glasses for ten cents apiece. The folks turned out, and they kept coming. Although we called it Walton’s Five and Dime, it was a Ben Franklin franchise, and that store took off just like Newport had and turned into a good business right away. It really was an A-l store for these parts back then.

INEZ THREET, CLERK, WALTON’s FIVE AND DIME, BENTONVILLE:

“I guess Mr. Walton just had a personality that drew people in. He would yell at you from a block away, you know. He would just yell at everybody he saw, and that’s the reason so many liked him and did business in the store. It was like he brought in business by his being so friendly.

“He was always thinking up new things to try in the store. I remember one time he made a trip to New York, and he came back a few days later and said, ‘Come here, I want to show you something. This is going to be the item of the year.’ I went over and looked at a bin full of—I think they called them zori sandals—they call them thongs now. And I just laughed and said, ‘No way will those things sell. They’ll just blister your toes.’ Well, he took them and tied them together in pairs and dumped them all on a table at the end of an aisle for nineteen cents a pair. And they just sold like you wouldn’t believe. I have never seen an item sell as fast, one after another, just piles of them. Everybody in town had a pair.”

Right away I started looking around for store opportunities in other towns. Maybe it was just my itch to do more business, and maybe, too, I didn’t want all my eggs in one basket again. By 1952 I had driven down to Fayetteville and found an old grocery store that Kroger was abandoning because it was falling apart. It was right on the square, only 18 feet wide and 150 feet deep. Our main competitor was a Woolworth’s on one side of the square, and a Scott Store on the other side of the square. So here we were challenging two popular stores with a little old 18-foot independent variety store. It wasn’t a Ben Franklin franchise; we just called it Walton’s Five and Dime like the store in Bentonville. I remember sitting on the square right after I bought it listening to a couple of the local codgers say: “Well, we’ll give that guy sixty days, maybe ninety. He won’t be there long.”

But this store was ahead of its time too, self-service all the way, unlike the competition. This was the beginning of our way of operating for a long while to come. We were innovating, experimenting, and expanding. Somehow over the years, folks have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was something I dreamed up out of the blue as a middle-aged man, and that it was just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. It’s true that I was forty-four when we opened our first Wal-Mart in 1962, but the store was totally an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since Newport—another case of me being unable to leave well enough alone, another experiment. And like most other overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.

Of course I needed somebody to run my new store, and I didn’t have much money, so I did something I would do for the rest of my run in the retail business without any shame or embarrassment whatsoever: nose around other people’s stores searching for good talent. That’s when I made my first real hire, the first manager, Willard Walker.

WILLARD WALKER—FIRST MANAGER, WALTON’S FIVE AND DIME, FAYETTEVILLE:

“The first time I ever saw Sam Walton was when he and his brother-in-law, Nick Robson, dropped into a TG&Y dime store I was managing in Tulsa. He visited with me for about an hour, asking a lot of questions, and left, and I never thought anything about it. Later on he called me and said he was opening a new store in Fayetteville and wondered if Id be interested in interviewing for the manager’s job. I had to move myself over there, work half days for free until the store opened, and I remember sleeping on a cot in the storeroom. But he said I would get a percentage of the profits, and that appealed to me. When I went to quit TG&Y, the vice president said, ‘Remember, Willard, a percentage of nothing is still nothing.’ But I went ahead and took the job. Sam was down there every day from the time we started until the time we left. He rolled up his sleeves and worked every day until we built that store from scratch.

“Sam would haul in all kinds of merchandise that he bought from these friends of his over in Tennessee—haul it in by station wagon. It worked real good. The first year that store was open, I believe Bentonville did $95,000 and we did $90,000.

“Well, later on, when we had Wal-Marts and went public, I went out and borrowed what seemed like an awful lot of money at the time and bought stock with it. Bud and Sam came down to the store one day, and Bud said: ‘Willard, I sure hope you know what you’re doing.’ He told me I had more faith than he did. I always knew it was going to be successful. The philosophy made sense, and you couldn’t help but believe in the man.”

In the years to come, that lure of partnership helped us attract a lot of good managers, but I don’t believe we ever had one who bought more stock than Willard. And of course he feels pretty good about it today.

I remember those days mostly as a time of always looking around for ideas and items that would make our stores stand out. Sometime in there the Hula Hoop fad hit real big, and they were flooding the big-city stores. But the genuine articles, which were made of plastic hose, were pricey and hard for us to get. Jim Dodson—the fellow who wouldn’t sell me the Siloam Springs store—called me and said he knew a manufacturer who could make hose the same size as the Hula Hoop’s. He thought we should go in fifty-fifty and make our own Hula Hoops. We did. We made them up in his attic, and sold a ton of them at his stores and mine. Every kid in northwest Arkansas had to have one. Later Jim ended up managing a Wal-Mart for us up in Columbia, Missouri, for about fifteen years.

Also at that time, I had been buying all my fixtures from Ben Franklin. They were wooden standards, which was par for the course in those days, with wooden shelf brackets to hold the merchandise. Then I went somewhere to look at what Sterling Stores was doing—most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from somebody else—and saw these all-metal fixtures. I met a guy named Gene Lauer here in Bentonville and persuaded him to build us some for the Fayetteville store, which became, I’m sure, the first variety store in the country to use 100 percent metal standards, like the ones you see in stores today. Gene built the fixtures for the first Wal-Mart and stayed with us for twenty-one years before retiring a few years ago. Today he works here in Bentonville at the Wal-Mart Visitors Center, which is sort of a museum located on the site of that first store.

CHARLIE CATE, STOCKBOY IN FAYETTEVILLE STORE, NOW RETIRED WAL-MART STORE MANAGER:

“Sam used to come down to our Fayetteville store driving an old fifty-three Plymouth. He had that car so loaded up he barely had enough room to drive. And would you like to guess what he had in it? Ladies’ panties. Three for $1.00 and four for $1.00 and nylon hose. He would come in and take an end counter, and say, ‘Now, Charlie, here’s what you do: on this feature bin you put three for $1.00 panties, and on this one you put four for $1.00. And you put these nylons right in between the two of them. And then watch em sell.’ And they did. Like crazy.”

While I was doing all this running around between Bentonville and Fayetteville and Tennessee and the Ben Franklin regional office in Kansas City, my brother Bud had borrowed some money and bought a Ben Franklin of his own up in the little town of Versailles, Missouri, population 2,000. He and I kept in touch, but we weren’t really doing any business together, and he had started a family and was doing pretty well on his own. Well, one time when I was up in Kansas City I heard about this big subdivision going up there—Ruskin Heights. In the middle of the subdivision would be a 100,000-square-foot shopping center —a whole new concept at that time. It was going to have an A&P store and a Ben Franklin store in the middle, a Crown drugstore on the end, and small shops in between. So I called Bud and told him to meet me up there right away. I said, “You want to gamble and go into this thing?” And he said, “Might as well.” And we did. We borrowed all the money we could and went into that Ben Franklin fifty-fifty.

BUD WALTON:

“In the early days of the variety store business out here, there were some conventions among competitors. Each chain more or less controlled its own state. Oklahoma was TG&Y. Kansas was Alco, Texas was Mott’s, Missouri was Mattingly. Nebraska was Hested’s. Indiana was Danners. They were locally based and developed, and they’d say, ‘Well, you don’t cross my border, and I won’t cross your border.’ Ben Franklin franchises were for little independent operators who wanted to fit a store or two somewhere in the cracks between those guys. Of course, Sam changed all that. Borders didn’t mean much to my brother. He thought nothing of doing business in four states—all in one day.”

If I ever had any doubts about the potential of the business we were in, Ruskin Heights ended them. That thing took off like a house afire. The first year we made about $30,000 profits on sales of $250,000, which went up to $350,000 in no time. When I saw that shopping center catch on the way it did I thought, “Man, this is the forerunner of many, many things to come.” And I decided—with no money to amount to anything—to go into the shopping center development business myself back in Arkansas. I went down to Little Rock just on fire with the idea of being the pioneer shopping center developer there. I tried to get one real good corner, but a big wheeler-dealer with Sterling Stores bought it out from under me and put in what became the town’s first shopping center, which featured a Sterling Store and an Oklahoma Tire and Supply.

I kept at it. I probably spent two years going around trying to sell people on the idea of shopping centers in Arkansas in the middle fifties—which was about ten years too early. I finally got an option on one piece of property and talked Kroger and Woolworth into signing leases, based on us getting this one street paved. I started raising money for the pavement, but it got real complicated, and in the end I decided I had better take my whipping, so I backed out of the whole deal and went back to concentrating on the retail business. I probably lost $25,000, and that was at a time when Helen and I were counting every dollar. It was probably the biggest mistake of my business career. I did learn a heck of a lot about the real estate business from the experience, and maybe it paid off somewhere down the line—though I would rather have learned it some cheaper way. Incidentally, after I dropped my option on that last piece of land, a well-known young fellow named Jack Stephens—who had a whole lot more money than I did—went on to develop a successful shopping center that’s still there.

DAVID GLASS:

“Two things about Sam Walton distinguish him from almost everyone else I know. First, he gets up every day bound and determined to improve something. Second, he is less afraid of being wrong than anyone I’ve ever known. And once he sees he’s wrong, he just shakes it off and heads in another direction.”

All during that real estate fiasco, I was, of course, still trying to run these variety stores, and everything was going along great until May 20, 1957—I’ll never forget the day. Bud called me from Versailles and said a tornado had hit the Ruskin store. “Ah, it probably shook up a little glass,” I said. But later I got to worrying about it, and I couldn’t get through to anybody up there so I went on up to Kansas City to see for myself.

I got there about two in the morning and saw that the whole shopping center was practically leveled. None of our people were seriously hurt, but the store was about gone. And even though the merchandise and the fixtures were insured, it was still a big blow to Bud and me. This was our best store, the one we were really excited about. It was there one minute and gone the next. We just rebuilt it and got back at it. By now, though, with all the places I had to visit, I was driving too much to have time for anything else. So I began to wonder if maybe flying wouldn’t be the way to go.

BUD WALTON:

“One day I got a call from Sam, and he said, ‘Meet me in Kansas City, I want to buy an airplane.’ Boy, it took me by such surprise. I always thought he was the world’s worst driver and even my father wouldn’t ever let Sam drive him. I thought, ‘He will kill himself the first year.’ So I did everything in the world to try and talk him out of that first airplane. He just said, ‘Whether you meet me or not, I’m going to look at this airplane.’ And I did not go because I knew he would kill himself in that plane. He called me later and said he hadn’t bought that particular plane, but he’d gone to Oklahoma City and bought this Air Coupe for $1,850, and I had to come see it. I’ll never forget going out to the Bentonville airport and seeing what he called an airplane. It had a washing machine motor in it, and it would putt-putt, and then miss a lick, then putt-putt again. It didn’t even look like an airplane, and I wouldn’t go near it for at least two years. But then we were putting some more stores in around Little Rock, and one day he says, ‘Let’s go to Little Rock.’ I hadn’t flown since the Navy in the Pacific, and I was always used to water. Here we were with Sam at the stick going over all these trees and mountains. It was the longest trip I ever took. That was the start of the Wal-Mart aviation era.”

In spite of what Bud says, I loved that little two-seat plane because it would go 100 miles an hour—if you didn’t have the wind against you—and I could get to places in a straight line. In all the years and thousands of hours I’ve been flying, I’ve only had one engine failure, and it came in that Air Coupe. I was taking off from Fort Smith and was just over the river when an exhaust stack blew. It sounded like the end of the world. The motor hadn’t quite quit, but I had to cut it off. For a minute there I thought that might be it for me, but I was able to circle back and land with a dead engine.

Once I took to the air, I caught store fever. We opened variety stores, many of them Ben Franklin franchises, in Little Rock, Springdale, and Siloam Springs, Arkansas, and we had a couple more in Neodesha and Coffeyville, Kansas. All these stores were organized as separate partnerships between Bud and me, along with other partners, including my dad, Helen’s two brothers—Nick and Frank—and even the kids, who invested their paper route money.

JOHN WALTON, SECOND SON OF SAM AND HELEN:

“This is hard to believe, but between my paper route money and the money I made in the Army —both of which I invested in those stores—that investment is worth about $40 million today.”

Whatever money we made in one store, we’d put it in another new one, and just keep on going. Also, from Willard Walker on, we would offer to bring the managers we hired in as limited partners. If you had, say, a $50,000 investment in a store, and the manager put in $1,000, he’d own 2 percent.

GARY REINBOTH:

“He would never let us buy more than $1,000 per store. I think $600 of it was a loan, and $400 of it was four shares of privately owned stock at $100 a share. All he would guarantee was that he would pay us interest every year, which at that time was 4 ½ percent. I remember one guy who ran a store would call and say, ‘Are you going to buy into store so-and-so?’ And I’d say, ‘I think so.’ Later, he would say, ‘I’m not going to loan it to Sam and let him expand on my money.’ Then I’d pick up the phone and call Mr. Walton and say, ‘So-and-so isn’t going to buy his share of that store, can I buy his share?’ He’d say, ‘Sure.’ So I’d get a double share.”

That whole period—which scarcely gets any attention from most people studying us—was really very, very successful. In fifteen years’ time, we had become the largest independent variety store operator in the United States. But the business itself seemed a little limited. The volume was so little per store that it really didn’t amount to that much. I mean, after fifteen years —in 1960—we were only doing $1.4 million in fifteen stores. By now, you know me. I began looking around hard for whatever new idea would break us over into something with a little better payoff for all our efforts.

Our first big clue came in Saint Robert, Missouri—near Fort Leonard Wood—where we learned that by building larger stores, which we called family centers —we could do unheard-of amounts of business for variety stores, over $2 million a year in sales per store, just unthinkable for small towns. The same thing proved true to a lesser degree in Berryville, Arkansas, and right here in Bentonville too.

I began to hear talk of the early discounters—companies like Ann & Hope, whose founder, Marty Chase, is generally considered the father of discounting. Spartan’s and Mammoth Mart and Two Guys from Harrison and Zayre and Arlan’s were all starting up in the Northeast, and I remembered that lesson I’d learned a long time ago in Newport with the panties selling in such huge volume when they were priced at $1.00, instead of $1.20. So I started running all over the country, studying the concept from the mill stores in the East to California, where Sol Price started his Fed-Mart in 1955.

Then closer to home, Herb Gibson—a barber from over at Berryville—started his stores with a simple philosophy: “Buy it low, stack it high, sell it cheap.” He sold it cheaper than anybody ever had before, and he sold more of it. He did it in Abilene, he did it in Amarillo, and he surrounded Dallas with stores. Then in 1959 he came to northwest Arkansas with a franchiser named Howard’s and did so well in Fort Smith that he branched out to the square in Fayetteville and started competing with our variety stores. We knew we had to act. He was the only one discounting out this way, and, because I had made all those trips back East, I was probably one of the few out here who understood what he was up to.

By then, I knew the discount idea was the future. But I was used to franchising, and I liked the mind-set. I generally liked my experience with Ben Franklin, and I didn’t want to get involved in having to build a company with all that support apparatus. So, first I went up to Butler Brothers in Chicago armed with my usual yellow legal pad full of notes and made a big pitch for them to back me in a discounting venture. I wanted them to be our wholesale arm, our merchandiser. If they had agreed, our family could have continued our fairly normal lifestyle. In those days, I wasn’t as fully committed with my time to the business, and it wouldn’t have been all that difficult to put together an organization with them. But they weren’t interested. Then I approached Gibson, but he already had his franchiser so we couldn’t get together either. We really had only two choices left: stay in the variety store business, which I knew was going to be hit hard by the discounting wave of the future; or open a discount store. Of course I wasn’t about to sit there and become a target. Now, right down the road from Bentonville sits Rogers, Arkansas, which was a good bit bigger town, but I never could operate there because Max Russell owned the Ben Franklin franchise. I tried to talk him into going in with me as a partner and building a big store there. But he wasn’t interested.

I went ahead and started building a store in Rogers. It was a big commitment on the family’s part. We couldn’t use Ben Franklin at all for that store, so I had made some arrangements with a distributor in Springfield, Missouri.

Nobody wanted to gamble on that first Wal-Mart. I think Bud put in 3 percent, and Don Whitaker—whom I had hired to manage the store from a TG&Y store out in Abilene, Texas—put in 2 percent, and I had to put up 95 percent of the dollars. Helen had to sign all the notes along with me, and her statement allowed us to borrow more than I could have alone. We pledged houses and property, everything we had. But in those days we were always borrowed to the hilt. We were about to go into the discount business for real now. And from the time those doggone Wal-Marts opened until almost today, it has been a little challenging.

BOB BOGLE, FIRST MANAGER—WALTON’S FIVE AND DIME, bentonville, now retired from wal-mart:

“We were flying to Fort Smith in the spring of 1962, and Sam was piloting the plane over the Boston Mountains. It was that Tri-Pacer by then, not the original plane that we had made a lot of trips in. Sam pulled this card out of his pocket, on which he had written down three or four names, and he handed it to me and asked me which one I liked best. They all had three or four words in the title, and I said, ‘Well, you know, Scotch as I am, I’d just keep the Walton name and make it a place to shop.’ I scribbled ‘W-A-L-M-A-R-T’ on the bottom of the card and said, ‘To begin with, there’s not as many letters to buy.’ I had bought the letters that said Ben Franklin, and I knew how much it cost to put them up and to light them and repair the neon, so I said, ‘This is just seven letters.’ He didn’t say anything, and I dropped the subject. A few days later I went by to see when we could start setting the fixtures in the building, and I saw that our sign maker, Rayburn Jacobs, already had the ‘W-A-L’ up there and was headed up the ladder with an ‘M.’ You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out what the name was going to be. I just smiled and went on.”

Something else about that sign that’s worth mentioning. On one side of it, I had Rayburn put “We Sell for Less,” and on the other, “Satisfaction Guaranteed,” two of the cornerstone philosophies that still guide the company.

After years and years of studying the discount business and experimenting with it sort of halfheartedly, we were finally getting ready to jump into it whole hog. On July 2, 1962, we finally opened Wal-Mart No. 1, and not everybody was happy about it.

LEE SMITH, EARLY WAL-MART ASSOCIATE:

“Because there was a Ben Franklin store in Rogers, run by somebody else, we really stirred up a hornet’s nest when we opened that first store. I vividly remember opening day. Along with the crowds of shoppers, a group of ‘officials’ from Ben Franklin in Chicago—all dressed in pin-striped suits—showed up. They marched in like a military delegation, and in the front of the store asked me, just as cold as they could be, ‘Where is Mr. Walton?’ They marched on back to Sam’s office without a word.

“They were back there about a half hour, and then they marched out without so much as a goodbye. A few minutes later, Sam came down and told Whitaker and me that they had issued an ultimatum: Don’t build any more of these Wal-Mart stores. We knew he felt threatened because he had all those Ben Franklin franchises. But we also knew Sam Walton wasn’t the kind of guy you issued ultimatums to.”

To tell the truth, though, that first Wal-Mart in Rogers wasn’t all that great. We did a million dollars in a year, a lot more than most of our variety stores, which did $200,000 to $300,000 a year. But remember, Saint Robert—up there in that Army town—was doing $2 million in sales. Once we opened Rogers, we sat there and held our breath for two years. Then we put stores up in Springdale, a bigger town near Rogers, and Harrison, a smaller town. Here, of course, I have to let David Glass tell his now-famous story about coming to Harrison to see what a Wal-Mart was, and being so horrified at the sight.

DAVID GLASS:

“In those days, word was starting to get out that a guy named Sam Walton had some interesting retailing ideas, so I drove down from Springfield, where I was with Crank Drugs at the time, to see a Wal-Mart opening. It was the worst retail store I had ever seen. Sam had brought a couple of trucks of watermelons in and stacked them on the sidewalk. He had a donkey ride out in the parking lot. It was about 115 degrees, and the watermelons began to pop, and the donkey began to do what donkeys do, and it all mixed together and ran all over the parking lot. And when you went inside the store, the mess just continued, having been tracked in all over the floor. He was a nice fellow, but I wrote him off. It was just terrible.”

I guess it really was about as bad as David describes it, but he just happened to hit it on its worst day. The store was only 12,000 square feet, and had an 8-foot ceiling and a concrete floor, with bare-boned wooden plank fixtures. Sterling had a huge variety store in downtown Harrison, with tile on the floor, nice lights, really good fixtures, and good presentations. Ours was just barely put together—highly promotional, truly ugly, heavy with merchandise—but for 20 percent less than the competition. We were trying to find out if customers in a town of 6,000 people would come to our kind of a barn and buy the same merchandise strictly because of price. The answer was yes. We found out they did, and they wanted it. Today, we have a 90,000-square-foot store in Harrison. Down the road in Springdale, we were trying to learn something else: would a really big, nice store work in a larger town? We opened a 35,000-square-foot Wal-Mart there, and it quickly became our number-one store in sales. Just to give you some idea of how the whole concept has changed over the years, we recently opened a gigantic 185,000-square-foot store in Springdale, and the store in Rogers today is 135,000 square feet compared to 18,000 for the original old number one.

Maybe a lot of people saw the same things David Glass observed that day out there in Harrison, but I was feeling pretty good. After we got those first three stores up and running, I knew it would work.

Wal-Mart was off to a good start, and we saw lots of potential. But now Gibson’s and other folks were beginning to look at the smaller towns and say, “Hey, maybe there is something out there that we ought to look into.” We figured we’d better roll the stores out just as quickly as we could.